Enhancing intercultural effectiveness in international virtual student teams: an exploratory study
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Enhancing intercultural effectiveness in international virtual student teams: an exploratory study Irina Petrovskaya1
· Sergei Shaposhnikov1
Received: 25 September 2018 / Accepted: 30 March 2020 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract Internationalisation of higher education implies the need to prepare students to work in a globalized and culturally diverse environment by developing adequate intercultural competences. The present study focused on the behavioural dimension of intercultural communication competence and investigated whether the short-term experience of working on a project assignment in a virtual multicultural team could produce an increase in students’ intercultural effectiveness. The study employed a single-group pre-test-post-test research design. The sample included 73 students representing 16 nationalities studying in Russian and Japanese universities majoring in business or economics. Students’ responses on the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (Portalla and Chen in Intercult Commun Stud 19(3):21–37, 2010) were collected before and after the project, and paired difference tests (t test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test) were used for data analysis. Results indicate that that overall intercultural effectiveness of the students by the end of the project increased as compared to pre-test scores. Significant shifts were registered for five of the six dimensions of intercultural effectiveness: Behavioural Flexibility, Interaction Relaxation, Interactant Respect, Message Skills and Identity Maintenance. Findings suggest that virtual multicultural team assignments can contribute to the development of intercultural competence as a meaningful internationalisation outcome, and therefore may be an appropriate and cost-effective tool for enhancing internationalisation at home. Other implications for educators are discussed. Keywords Intercultural competence · Intercultural effectiveness · Global virtual teams · Multicultural teams · Business education · Internationalisation of higher education
1 Introduction Internationalisation is one of the top priorities of the higher education institutions (Robson 2011), and is explicitly stated as one of assessment criteria applied by organizations accrediting business education programs or institutions (e.g. EFMD 2018a, b; AACSB 2017). The ultimate purpose of internationalisation at business schools is to prepare students to work in
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Irina Petrovskaya [email protected] http://www.mgubs.ru Lomonosov Moscow State University Business School, 1-44 Leninskie Gory, Moscow, Russia119234
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I. Petrovskaya, S. Shaposhnikov
a globalized and culturally diverse environment by developing adequate intercultural competences (Cheney 2001; Montgomery 2009; Egron-Polak and Hudson 2014). Intercultural competence of the business students makes them more marketable (Ghose 2010), and ultimately can be seen as a part of the competitive advantage for today’s organisations operating in the global environment (Ng et al. 2009). Internationalisation is “the process of int
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